 Today we're going to show how to teach your dog how to catch a frisbee. Okay, so this is my 12-week-old German Shepherd. His name is Sammy. Hi, Sammy. Hey, buddy. Want to play frisbee? So today I just introduced him to the frisbee. Okay, and what I have is a puncture resistant frisbee and I highly recommend this frisbee because it's not going to shatter or fall apart on you. I had one for my last German Shepherd, Bogey, and it lasted him all the way to the end of his life, and I ended up burying him with his frisbee. He loved it that much. So this is what we do. Frisbee, come here. Come on. Get the frisbee. See what I'm doing now is I'm teaching him how to jump up and get the frisbee in his mouth like that. Good boy. Good boy. Now, he's only 12 weeks old, so you're not going to expect him to catch the frisbee immediately. But what you can do to make it easy, what I do is I flip it over like this so he has something to grab on to. Ready? Go get it. And what he's practicing right now is not only jumping up and putting the frisbee in his mouth, but fetching it and bringing it back. So he's 12 weeks old right now. That's my little boy, Sammy. He thinks it's a chew toy. Good boy, Sammy. Good boy. Good boy. So we'll try that again. He loves that frisbee. Oops, he's jumping up before I can get it. Ready? Get it. Good boy, Sammy. Good boy. And this is how you get your dog interested in playing frisbee at a young age. And what you can do too is we have a bunch of tennis balls lying around the house. So you can take the tennis ball. At this age, all dogs love to chase the tennis ball. But what you can do is start doing the same thing. But instead of holding the frisbee up here, hold the tennis ball up there so they get used to jumping up, that jumping up and grabbing it in their mouth. And eventually what you can do is just take, at a close range, take the tennis ball and just kind of throw it toward their nose. And eventually they'll start opening their mouth and catching it in there. And they'll make that correlation with the frisbee as well. So what we're going to do is we're going to check back and I'll keep documenting this and along with Sammy's progress on catching a frisbee. Okay, I forgot to mention one last thing too. In order to get your dog also further prepped to catch a frisbee, try doing this. Ready? What I do is I put it on the end of his nose. See what he does? Okay, let's try that again. And also to release the frisbee, you want to say firmly, drop. Drop it. Drop. And he'll get used to that too. So sit, sit, sit. That's all you do. Right on the top of the nose. And he'll pop his head up and he'll catch it like that. That's it. Okay, so we will check in a little bit further down the road. Today is December 5th, 2013. So we'll try to do a progress report every so often. Not sure exactly when, but that's it for now. Okay, today is December 8th, 2013. And we're working on frisbee training. Frisbee. Oh, yes, frisbee. I love frisbee. So what I have now, I have a couple different frisbees too. This is a really soft cloth one. And this one's a mesh with some kind of styrofoam probably in the inside. But what I'm doing is, Sammy, it's like I'm thirsty. But what I'm doing is we're working on not just throwing it over to a specific area or whatever and having him chase it, but I'll show you in a second. After he gets some water. Sammy, get the frisbee. So what I'm doing is I'm walking. I'm walking with a frisbee. Come on. Get the frisbee. He's just learning this. Well, no, you're not supposed to just grab it, Sammy. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Get it. Get it. Get the frisbee. Get it. So we're getting him to walk. Walk and jump and catch the frisbee in his mouth. So this is really stage two of what we're doing. The first time we met, what we did was we had the frisbee. He doesn't want to let go of it. Drop. Drop. Good boy. And the first time we were just holding it up in the air and he was jumping up and catching it. And we were also going like that, putting it on the top of his nose so he could lift his head up and catch it. So today we started the walking with it and he's following it and then jumping up in the air. So he's getting himself used to it now. He's still 12 weeks old. He's going on 13 weeks. And what we're doing is we have this little soft frisbee that I just throw in the air like that and it bounces off his nose and he tries to catch it. But he's getting used to. He's getting used to the frisbees and it's going to take a little while. It's not going to happen overnight and you know, it's going to take a lot of time, effort and patience to get your dog to catch a frisbee, but it will happen. When you put that time and effort in, it will happen. So these are the gradual training steps that we're doing. OK, one thing you can do too is to take a tennis ball and work on your dog catching the tennis ball like that. Something simple. But what he's doing is it's kind of like hand-eye coordination, but for a dog is eye-mouth coordination and he's coordinating his mouth with the tennis ball and that will transfer over to the frisbee. So what I did there was I gave it a different angle. Instead of throwing it up in the air, I bounced it on the ground and that gives him even more perception of depth and a different angle on how to catch things. So work on that with your puppy. If you're indoors, if the weather's not great, if you can't make it outside for a particular day, you can always use a tennis ball and work with your dog doing that. That's what we're doing with our cloth frisbee. Ready, Sammy? And there it is. Good boy. Good boy, Sammy. Ready? Ready? There it comes. Good boy. Good boy. Yeah, I just wanted to show that. It wasn't just a one-time fluke. You know, he's doing this on a regular basis. Ready? Usually. Here it comes. Ready? He goes, that's easy. That's an easy trick to do. But yeah, so he was born on September 1st. So September, October, November, December. So essentially, he's still three months old, but he's almost just about four months old and catching a frisbee on a regular basis. OK, just on a side note, the dog in the title clip of the video was my last German shepherd, Bogey, who I had to put to sleep about five years ago. When Bogey was two years old, he was playing ball with my daughter in our backyard. And when he jumped up to catch it, he landed awkwardly on his back leg and fractured it in four different places. So after $10,000 in surgery, he basically had a bionic leg put together with all sorts of rods and pins. But as you can see, this picture was taken several years after his surgery. And I sent the picture to a surgeon thanking him for restructuring his leg and allowing him to do what he loves to do, which is to play frisbee. Now, I've seen all sorts of breeds of dogs catch frisbees, including many rescue dogs from shelters and a female Doverman who was wonderful at catching them. So it really doesn't matter what type of breed you have, as long as their mouths are big enough to catch a frisbee. The bottom line is to take the time and effort with your dog. And he or she will reward you handsomely. I'll do a follow up video on Sammy's progress. But for now, this video is all you really need to teach your dog how to catch a frisbee. Enjoy and have fun.